Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television by Annie Berke

Abstract

Reviewed by: Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television by Annie Berke Sara Bakerman (bio) Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television by Annie Berke. University of California Press. Feminist Media Histories. 2022. 302 pages. $85.00 hardcover; $29.95 paper; also available in e-book. In the summer of 2020, in the midst of a chat about future projects, a senior scholar asked me for recommendations of exemplary studies of individuals in media contexts. As a well-known scholar of the television industry, she wanted to turn her attention to the individuals who created and experienced cultures of production from the inside. Certainly, such studies exist—many of them influence my own work on aging stars—but none came to mind in the moment.1 Today, dear scholar, I'd like to suggest Annie Berke's Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television as a sterling addition to that category. Berke's book, published in January 2022 by the University of California Press, is notably the first in the new Feminist Media Histories book series edited by Shelley Stamp.2 Like the journal for which that series is named (also founded by Stamp), Their Own Best Creations seamlessly bridges the fields of media studies and feminist studies via a rich and lively exploration [End Page 198] of the women who scripted the first Golden Age of television. In contrast to luminaries such as Lucille Ball and Gracie Allen, most women who worked in the nascent television industry are forgotten today, their names and contributions perhaps briefly acknowledged yet quickly vanishing from the archival register. These neglected talents include Gertrude Berg, writer-star of The Goldbergs (CBS, 1949–1956); Irna Phillips, writer-creator of multiple famed soap operas, including Guiding Light (CBS, 1952–2009) and As the World Turns (CBS, 1956–2010); and Madelyn Pugh, writer of many iconic episodes of I Love Lucy (CBS, 1951–1957). Berke covers their work and that of others in her well-researched history of early television's women writers, whose experience of and perspective on the gender politics of their eras necessarily inform the industry's depiction of them. "The book's title, Their Own Best Creations," Berke writes, "reveals my investment in looking at these women writers' scripted lives, their personas and creative output, as formative presences in postwar femininity."3 The author's interest in these figures reads as neither purely biographical nor simply a righting of media historiography's failure to spotlight such women until now. Instead, Berke shows that women writers—as well as producers, story editors, and analysts—not only understood their place in a burgeoning industry but also experienced, in retrospect, a significant tension between their series' portrayals of postwar sociocultural pressures on gender and femininity and "second-wave feminism's emphasis on professionalism and self-actualization."4 Throughout the book, Berke separates individual subjects from personal politics by drawing comparisons between televisual text and private writings, ultimately crafting an argument that frames each figure through a necessarily feminist lens. Textually and interpersonally, the women who make up Berke's study represent a range of positionalities vis-à-vis gender, politics, and labor. For example, in chapter 3, early domestic sitcoms written by and featuring Berg and Peg Lynch, the writer-star of Ethel & Albert (NBC, CBS, ABC, 1953–1956), are read by Berke as "allegorical plays about women television professionals," a framing that enables their onscreen representation as both "the woman at home and the woman at work, suggesting that smart, motivated women might not have to choose between career and family."5 But Phillips, a trailblazer of soap opera narratives that Berke argues "subtly undermined postwar discourses of sexism and misogyny," rejected the label feminist and did not overtly adhere to such politics in her public persona. Berke references Phillips's obituary notices, which cite the writer's belief that "'women are happier being dependent on men.'"6 Yet, as Berke shows, Phillips's early soaps, situated as they are within the domestic sphere and family life, also demonstrate how the writer "invented herself as someone equipped to express the needs of American women," inventing complex narratives [End Page 199...